AT&T and Tegna reached a new multiyear carriage agreement that will keep Tegna stations on DirecTV and U-verse with no interruption, Tegna said in a news release Friday. Tegna's 46 stations reach a third of U.S. households, it said.

ATSC President Mark Richer sees 10 more ATSC 3.0 ingredients moving to candidate standard status this month, he said in the December issue of ATSC’s monthly newsletter, The Standard, published Monday. The new candidate standards will include those of “major elements” of ATSC 3.0, among them video encoding, Internet protocol transport, electronic service guides, second-screen services and closed captioning, Richer said. He expects ATSC will “finalize the few remaining” candidate standards for audio, security and interactive capabilities in early 2016, he said. The candidate standard phase of ATSC 3.0 “is not a time to take a breath,” Richer said. It’s “a critical time for broadcasters to implement test services and for professional and consumer equipment manufacturers to fine-tune their prototypes and demonstrate the capabilities of ATSC 3.0,” he said. “And it’s the time for all stakeholders to work together on any necessary clarifications to the standards documents to assure interoperability.”

An FCC proposal to require noncommercial education stations to use restricted-use FCC registration numbers on reports used to gather information about media ownership will “contribute nothing useful to the FCC’s picture of diversification,” said 70 public TV stations in a filing opposing the measure in docket 10-234. “Persons reported on NCE ownership reports are not ‘owners’ of broadcast stations as that concept is understood by the FCC and the Courts,” said the filing. “Collection and retention of this information with commercial broadcast ownership information will taint the value of such information.” Having to submit personal information and digits from their Social Security numbers will put NCE board members at risk of identity theft, the stations said. “This is particularly true given that the federal government has been repeatedly shown over the last year to be abjectly incapable of protection of stored personal data,” the filing said. “The FCC’s proposal as it would apply to NCE stations is bad policy and legally unsupportable.”

Sinclair treated a delegation of 11 South Korean broadcast industry experts in Las Vegas Thursday to the “first end-to-end transmission” of Ultra HD signals with high dynamic range using the proposed ATSC 3.0 transmission standard, the broadcaster said in a Thursday announcement. The broadcast of content encoded with the H.265's codec’s scalability extension adopted a year ago originated from Sinclair’s facility on Black Mountain near Las Vegas using a prototype Teamcast modulator and was received 15 miles away by prototype receiver technology developed by Technicolor and Sinclair’s subsidiary One Media, Sinclair said. South Korea is weighing whether to use ATSC 3.0 to transmit Ultra HD video of the February 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, Sinclair said. While U.S. broadcasters will have the option to use ATSC 3.0 to transmit Ultra HD and other services within their existing 6-MHz channels, South Korea has assigned new channels to broadcasters specifically to transmit in Ultra HD, it said. The ATSC 3.0 demonstration for the South Korean delegation was “just a preview” of what Sinclair, Samsung and Pearl TV plan to show at CES (see 1511050048), Sinclair said.

The FCC shouldn’t impose a deadline for low-power TV displacement applications that is retroactive or becomes effective on the day it's announced, Gray told Commissioner Mike O’Rielly and Commissioner Ajit Pai’s aide Matthew Berry in separate meetings Wednesday and Thursday, according to an ex parte filing. “Licensees must be given sufficient warning of this crucial deadline to allow them to complete construction and license permitted facilities.” Such a deadline should be set six months in the future, it said. “This will give permittees with either partially built stations or concrete plans to build a station sufficient time to complete construction and license the facility.”

Tegna completed its buy of three Sander Media TV stations, it said in a news release Thursday. The stations are KGW Portland, Oregon; WHAS-TV Louisville; and KMSB Tucson. The FCC approved the transfers and a nine-month temporary waiver of the local TV ownership rule last month (see 1511230051). The deal is connected with the Gannett/Belo transaction.

The FCC Media Bureau changed the ex parte rules for docket 14-150, on PMCM’s channel assignment, from permit-but-disclose to restricted, said a public notice Thursday. The grant of PMCM’s requests for an alternative PSIP or for emergency relief from the bureau’s channel assignment “would require a waiver of the Commission’s rules, and non-tariff waiver proceedings are restricted,” the PN said. The public interest “would be best served by designating this proceeding as restricted in order to ensure fairness to all parties and to promote efficiency in the resolution of the matters at hand,” the PN said. “This proceeding involves a small number of parties to a fact-specific dispute.”

A PMCM TV ex parte filing on a meeting with FCC officials left out (see 1511270044) CBS and Meredith’s objections to PMCM’s proposal that it be restored to major/minor virtual channel 3.10, the major broadcasters said in their own ex parte filing in docket 14-150 posted Wednesday. “PMCM wishes to ‘restore’ operation for which it had no authority in the first instance." PMCM’s claim to virtual channel 3.10 “has been rejected by a well-reasoned [Media] Bureau decision and the D.C. Circuit declined to grant mandamus,” the latest ex parte filing said. “PMCM has a pending Application for Review of the Bureau’s decision, and these further filings appear to be simply an effort to circumvent the Commission’s processes so it can return to the previously unauthorized operation.” PMCM just a repeats its previous arguments, they said. “Should PMCM propose solutions other than PSIP [Program and System Information Protocol] Channel 3.10, Meredith and CBS stand open to discuss them. Meredith and CBS, however, have made clear that they do not wish to engage any more resources in PMCM simply repeating the same thing.”

The Office of Management and Budget OK'd the FCC incentive auction short-form application, Form 177, the commission said in Wednesday's Federal Register, making Dec. 2 the effective date. The application filing window begins at noon EST Dec. 8, and runs through Jan. 12 at 6 p.m.

Comcast will include a national video description pilot program with NBC’s broadcast of The Wiz Live! Thursday, the first U.S. live entertainment program to be accessible to people with a visual disability, Comcast said. The video description narration track is inserted between the natural pauses in dialogue to describe the visual elements of a show or movie, including facial expressions, settings, costumes and stage direction. The pilot program, which coincides with the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, is available across the country where SAP (secondary audio program) feeds are available, Comcast said. Descriptive Video Works is delivering the video and audio description.